Gen. Ed. Jam-Up

One day about two weeks from now, the IBM machines of University Hall will spew forth the latest statistics on course enrollment at the College. As the whole freshman class--together with its advisors, its section men, and its lecturers--already knows, these figures will show that lower-level courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences are more crowded this fall than ever before.

This intelligence should not come as a surprise, since everything else at the College is also uncommonly crowded this fall. Deans and Housemasters have attacked the problem by cramming students into every square foot of available space, and administrators of freshman course might be expected, similarly, to make maximum use of whatever teaching facilities they have. The department of General Education has not done this, however. In five of the ten lower-level courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the department has retained enrollment limits that serve to turn disappointed freshmen away from courses they want to take and to pile up astronomical numbers of these students in the one or two courses that have room for them.

Professor Murdock, chairman of the Committee on General Education, suggested Tuesday that a student could always wait until his sophomore year to take a course that he wanted. Much more appropriate was the remark made yesterday by a lecturer in the Social Sciences, who observed that "if you have enrollment limits you've got to have disappointed freshmen." One obvious step toward improving the situation for next year, then, is simply to expand or remove the limits on several of the lower-level General Education courses. There is really no reason why courses like Social Sciences 2 and 4, which meet primarily in lectures, should have limited enrollments. Lecturing to 400 students cannot be much more difficult than lecturing to 200.

But removing enrollment limits will not by itself eliminate overcrowding in the courses involved. There remains the problem of providing additional section men to teach the additional students. Section men are regularly hired in the spring, however, whereas students show up for their courses in the fall, and it is usually impossible to know beforehand just which courses are going to need extra instructors. The General Education officials can solve this problem by the extension of an idea that is already being used by Social Sciences 1, 2 and 6. These, three courses, whose contents are more or less similar, have arranged this fall to "trade" section men in order to alleviate overcrowding wherever it is greatest. This method would not work for all lower-level Humanities and Social Sciences courses--some meet chiefly in section and therefore need specialized instructors--but there is no reason why its use cannot be expanded. Social Sciences 4, for example, could probably get in on the section man pool, and Humanities 2, 4, and 5 might very well establish one of their own.

This solution will provide only partial relief for the situation, however. In an expanding College the best permanent remedy for overcrowding in lower-level General Education courses is to have more of them. Yet such an increase is currently impossible, for the Faculty has put strict limits on the number of these courses that can be given in any one year. These limits should be raised immediately, so that additional choices in the Humanities and Social Sciences can be set up by next fall. The Class of '60's first encounter with the College curriculum might thus become a happier experience than the one this year's freshmen have had.